Julian McGauran (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Righto, that’s not a very good interjection! Anyway, it was a government majority report. What would you expect them to find? Of course, it got newspaper headlines. But what would you expect a House of Representatives, government majority report to find, other than that the sea levels are drastically rising? I have it in my office. I thought I might read it, but I will not.

I also read that the Rees government, those knaves from New South Wales, is now claiming sea-level rises. If ever there was a good excuse for a tax, it sure sounds like it when the Rees government jumps on the bandwagon of sea-level rises. They base their new tax, or their claims, on the fact that coastal waters would ‘rise 40 centimetres on 1990 levels by 2050’—they are not going to last that long, but anyway—‘with potentially disastrous effects’. And I know that the Prime Minister backed up that claim at the Lowy Institute. The Rees Labor government claimed there were some 700,000 houses in danger. The Prime Minister gave credence to that in a speech he made, saying that that was risking $150 billion dollars.

But there is another scientific group. There is a scientific group called the Bureau of Meteorology, which dispute that claim. The Bureau of Meteorology dispute the claim outright, saying the average yearly increase of 1.9 millimetres is what they have recorded since 1991. This is consistent with historical analysis showing that throughout the 20th century there was a modest rise in global sea levels of about 20 centimetres, or 1.7 millimetres per year on average. So the Bureau of Meteorology, with their measurements, their claims and their science, are saying that there is no surge in sea levels at all, and they do not predict that there will be any.